Worldwide American Spoken English for Middle Schoolers — A Four Step Program

Robert Oliphant EducationViews Columnist currently serves as executive director of The Alliance for High Speed Recreational Reading, and formerly served as executive director of Californians for Community College Equity

By Robert Oliphant –

My name is Bob and I’m a proper name junkie who likes to check out what’s on the doors of our professional office buildings today. Most of what’s there strikes me and my fellow junkies as exotically foreign, even though the professionals themselves speak perfect worldwide American English as taught on their home turf and as represented by the pronunciation and definitions presented available via dictionary.com and via WordGenius.com (Random House Unabridged). Given our own national rejection of standard “platform” pronunciation (apart from newscasters), it’s fair to say that the USA is now being conquered by its own language — scientifically and economically.

For concerned American parents, the strongest evidence of this foreign conquest is represented by the international status of our own Graduate Record Exam, which now offers over 300 foreign-locale testing sessions each year, along with a foreigner-friendly reduction of its subject exams from over thirty to only eight: biology, microbiology, chemistry, physics, psychology, math, computer science, and literature in English. Even more foreign-friendly has been the foreign development of GRE-style exams by India and the foreign offering (December 26, Newsweek) offering of GRE-relevant degree programs in American English by universities in Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan.

What’s here is not meant to urge the exploration of, say, the National University of Singapore (nus.edu.sg) as a baccalaureate program for youngsters now in high school. But it certainly emphasizes the need for American youngsters to start as middle schoolers to prepare on their own for the multi-national high-tech competitions that they will be facing in the years that lie ahead for them.

PRONUNCIATION AND PUBLIC SPEAKING CONFIDENCE. . . . As has been indicated, our cited American dictionaries already offer practical access to “platform” pronunciation via both keyboard-friendly symbols and listener-friendly phonetic pronunciation. Further help is available via nonpartisaneducationreview.org under the 5-eBook heading AlzHope. This includes sample tests, how to construct them, and how to calibrate the relative difficulty of specific pronunciation.